


Full Circle

by fnarmageddon



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: M/M, No Actual Plot Whatsoever, Post 10x22, Seriously nothing happens, Steve buys a gelato, That's it, finale fix-it, romance or bromance, who knows! not me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24018526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fnarmageddon/pseuds/fnarmageddon
Summary: Steve finds himself in Italy.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett & Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 13
Kudos: 124





	Full Circle

**Author's Note:**

> I have not written anything for literal years, but the ending was so bad that it bitchslapped my muse out of hibernation, so I suppose I should be thankful for that *galactic eyeroll*

So maybe he isn’t entirely truthful with Danny on the beach. He says something about needing to focus on himself and finding peace and fuck knows what else, he’s hardly listening to what’s coming out of his mouth and he knows he’s probably laying it on a bit thick and Jesus Christ he needs to shut up before he says something like “it’s not you, it’s me”, and has to leave the island forever out of sheer embarrassment, and it’s mostly bullshit but what possible way is there for him to say “hey Danny, I love you more than anyone else in the world but I need to get away from you, and from this place, and from the life we’ve built here together, because otherwise unspecified yet terrible things will happen”? It’s not like Hallmark make a card for that.

Ever since Danny brought him home from Washington, a low-level kind of panic has been building. It’s a gut instinct. Steve’s gut has served him well, it’s saved his life more times than he can count and he trusts it more than the evidence of his eyes. If Steve’s gut tells him something’s about to go sideways, then something’s about to go sideways. And Steve’s gut has been telling him that he has to leave, that he has to do it now, but he’s pushed it aside because obviously, it’s just the grief talking. And then out of nowhere he’s trying to make a deal with Daiyu Mei for Danny’s life, and then trying to make a deal with God for Danny’s life, and the whole time he’s thinking this is it, this is what I’ve been dreading and he should have listened to his gut because it really was onto something, and he expects to feel better once he knows Danny’s going to be okay but if anything, he feels worse because his gut is still trying to warn him of impending doom, that something even more catastrophic is inching over the horizon, and he could push it aside because obviously, it’s just the shock talking, but he‘s not about to make that mistake again. So he has to leave but he can’t think of a way to explain it without sounding like he’s finally lost his mind. He’s in the Twilight Zone, and no-one can see the gremlin on the wing of the plane but him.

So if he isn’t entirely forthcoming with the truth, it’s only because he’s not sure of it himself.

-x-

Steve’s fifteen years old when his mother dies and his father sends him away. It’s for his own good because his mother was murdered and his family has enemies, the kind of enemies that won’t hesitate to use the people you love against you, and Steve knows how his father felt now because God, he would have sent Danny away if he’d known what was coming, he'd have made him leave. Well, no, he wouldn’t have made him leave because Steve can’t make Danny do anything, but he can call Rachel who absolutely would have made Danny leave under threat of telling Grace, and yes, that would have been low and devious and Danny would probably have held a grudge about it forever, but that wouldn’t have mattered because he wouldn’t have been tortured and shot and nearly _killed_ because of the choices Doris made, so Steve would’ve taken the hit, it would have sucked but it would have been worth it to know Danny was safe-

But when Steve’s father does it to him, no-one tells him any of this, and Steve?

Steve’s fifteen years old. He just wants to go home.

-x-

He’s not sure how he ended up in Italy but he thinks he might stay for a while. He only spends one night in Rome - too busy, too far from the sea - before he moves down the coast to Sorrento for the diving in the Punta Campanella reserve and because it’s not far from Pompeii, which might be worth a day or two.

He can’t put his finger on what it is but he feels calmer here. Partly it’s the twelve-hour time difference; he couldn’t get any further away from Hawaii than this unless he went to the moon, so at least his gut has stopped yammering at him. And there’s the rainbow in the window of every gelateria, the hibiscus outside his hotel, and the volcano looming across the Bay of Naples. All he can feel when he thinks about home is an all-encompassing relief that he’s not there, but these little reminders are reassuring, grounding him. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he thinks he could find it here.

It’s not until the fifth day, when he’s taking a picture of his dinner to send to Danny with the caption “could have put this on the menu”, and the realisation hits that he’s chosen to seek peace surrounded by people who do half their talking with their hands and have strong opinions on what constitutes good pizza, that he starts to think he might have misjudged things a bit.

Day 6

The days have already taken on a rhythm: Steve wakes up early, goes for a swim or a run, spends the day exploring above water or below, goes for a run or a swim, hopes he’s worn himself out enough to sleep, catches up with his emails after dinner. Email is good, Steve gets along with email; he can send out a group report every day or two to keep most people happy and have a proper conversation with Danny separately. Things are a little awkward between them. Danny’s making all the right supportive noises but Steve knows Danny’s still at least moderately pissed at him for leaving because he’s not back at work and yet he hasn’t adjusted his sleep schedule to make sure they have a few hours where they’re both awake at the same time, and Danny would absolutely have done that under normal circumstances so yeah, he’s still pissed. Phone calls are a conversational minefield because they’re not quite in sync and Steve knows it’s his fault and he doesn’t know how to deal with it, so he’s been emailing instead of calling and trying not to feel like a coward.

It’s a better option than texting at least - even with everything they’re not talking about they still have plenty to say, and Danny’s thumbs have not got any less goofy over the years. And besides, on arrival in San Francisco Steve disengaged flight mode to discover that he’d been added to six separate new group chats, all comprised of different people, all wanting regular updates, at which point he shut the app down in a panic and has not dared to open it up again since.

-x-

Pompei - the modern town - is beautiful. Steve doesn’t know what he expected, an overpriced tacky tourist trap maybe, but it could almost be a movie set. There‘s something comforting about the silent presence of Vesuvius, although Steve is probably the only person there who thinks so. It’s not just the reminder of home. It’s that Steve thinks he’s in danger of wallowing if he lets himself, but he knows that even he might struggle to pull off brooding when there’s a volcano behind him doing a much better job of it without even trying, and he’s man enough to acknowledge when he’s outclassed. Still, it’s nice to have a volcano nearby, not that Vesuvius is anything like the ones back home. Hawaiian volcanoes are more like Danny, explosive but in a steady, known-quantity kind of way. Vesuvius is like Steve - all that power and fury buried far down, under strict control, but if he ever loses his grip on it he’s going to take out everything and everyone around him. Steve nods at the accuracy of this analogy, and makes a mental note never to repeat it anywhere Danny might hear him. 

He wanders around the ruins for a while, not looking at his map, just going where his feet take him, meandering in and out of buildings. It’s really incredible to think that this was all buried - Steve consults his guidebook - six metres deep. He tries, without much success, to imagine the amount of work that must have gone into excavating it; painstaking, time-consuming work that’s been going on for centuries and isn’t finished yet. Steve can’t even dream of having that kind of patience, but he supposes that in a way this is what Danny’s been doing for a decade, carefully uncovering him, trying not to damage anything in the process, wanting to learn what he used to be like before an explosion buried him in ash.

Steve’s not sure how a person goes about identifying with an entire ancient ruined city - and his guidebook is dazzlingly unhelpful in this regard - but for a beginner he thinks he’s doing quite well.

Day 7

The difference being, of course, he thinks late the following night (lying in bed with one hand on his stomach right over where Danny’s liver is happily tackling the peroni he allowed himself with dinner, a tangible and irrefutable reminder of how desperately he is loved) is that he, unlike Pompeii, is not a UNESCO World Heritage Site and if Danny keeps digging all he’s going to find is a scared high school quarterback with terrible dating technique. What on Earth does Danny think is under there that’s going to be worth all this effort?

Day 8

A week in, that initial sense of calm is starting to look like it might have been less of the ‘lasting peace’ and more of the ‘before the storm’ variety. Something is subtly off but he doesn’t know what it is. It’s not that anything is wrong exactly, his gut isn’t telling him that anything devastating is about to happen, more that he’s taken a wrong turn and even though the place he’s ended up in is a lovely place, he’s not where he was supposed to be.

Fittingly enough, it’s a nightmare that finally clues him in, and if that weren’t enough of a sign that his subconscious has finally run out of patience with him, it’s a nightmare featuring Danny. He’s in his hotel room, this very room, the one that he’s asleep in, and Danny turns up to take him home like he did in DC, but as soon as Danny says the words the room starts to fill with ash and Steve can barely see Danny through it and he can’t breathe and Danny doesn’t realise that Steve is suffocating right in front of him because the air is clear where he’s standing and he can’t seem to see the ash at all.

 _Are you going to let me in_ , he says, and that’s when Steve wakes up, choking on nothing.

-x-

The rule is: Steve’s mother dies, Steve leaves Hawaii, because if Steve doesn’t leave Hawaii, unspecified yet terrible things will happen. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t want to leave Hawaii. It doesn’t matter that Hawaii is where his family is, where his life is. It’s the rule. Everything that he is has been built on this rule. Steve’s mother dies, Steve leaves Hawaii.

Except that four months ago Steve’s mother died and Steve _went home_.

-x-

_It can’t be that simple_ , he thinks, a little hysterically, feet pounding on the sidewalk as if a lava flow is after him, because when has anything in his life been that simple? But it is, because the picture has finally come into focus, he’s found the 3D glasses, the key to crack the cipher. Danny came to DC to take him home and Steve let him. And Steve shouldn’t have done that. He broke the rule. He went home.

Right on cue the voice that is Danny in his head pipes up. “ _This_ rule? _This rule_ you think you have to follow? This rule that is a _bullshit rule_ unlike all the _very non-bullshit rules_ you have broken in the last decade since you decided that _don’t drive a police car onto a freighter_ wasn’t a rule you had to follow, nooooo, that rule can go fuck itself, but this rule, _this rule_ can stay?”, but what does Danny know. He hasn’t managed to dig that far down yet. Steve didn’t even know his ruins _went_ that far down.

If this were a movie, everything would suddenly be resolved and he would have found the peace he was looking for and he would move on instantly and never look back. He’d be on the next flight to Hawaii and he would pick his life back up and leave the ghosts of the past behind.

As this isn’t a movie, what actually happens is that Steve finds a bar and spends the morning mainlining coffee and trying to make this new-found knowledge fit into his existing mental jigsaw of his life while also trying to understand that the picture on the box doesn’t look anything like he thought it did. He can’t make sense of it. It’s like he’s fallen into a parallel universe where his life is exactly the same except for one small detail that makes it entirely different, which is much more fun when it’s happening to other people, who are fictional. He doesn’t get how something that happened nearly thirty years ago can still be manipulating his actions without him even being aware of it. He doesn’t get how Doris can still be pulling his strings so effectively even from beyond the grave. How many of his life choices haven’t really been his choices at all? How can she be dead and _still_ lying to him?

Oh God, he’s going to need so much therapy.

He cheers himself up by imagining the rant he’s going to be treated to when he tells Danny he’s come to the conclusion that he needs help and is Danny still willing to pay for it. By the time he’s finished picturing Danny apoplectically failing to get any words out at all, arms windmilling fit to break the sound barrier, he’s almost smiling. Then, since he was given medical assurance that his new liver would find a moderate alcohol intake acceptable, he finds a different bar, locks himself out of his email for twelve hours, and spends the afternoon getting moderately, quietly drunk.

Day 9

Steve’s gut is a _fucking_ liar.

Day 10

Two days after his big revelation, Steve wakes up in a snit for no reason at all. He slept okay, didn’t have any dreams that he’s aware of, but he’s… furious. His morning run doesn’t so much as take the edge off and it’s all he can do not to snarl at the hotel staff for having the nerve, the audacity, to smile at him and wish him _buon giorno_. He showers furiously, gets dressed furiously, eats breakfast furiously, ignores his emails because with the mood he’s in he’s likely to say something he can’t take back, and strops off to Pompeii like a toddler resisting a nap. By the time he gets there he’s sick of himself already.

He stomps around the ancient city for an hour but he’s not feeling it so he decides to climb Vesuvius instead. It’s not ideal - the bus takes him a lot closer to the summit than he would have liked - but he powers up to the top, scowls at the view, powers back down again, then repeats the process a few times, which does make him feel a little better, and also wears him out enough that the strange looks he gets from his fellow hikers, inasmuch as they register at all, don’t make his mood any worse than it already is.

By the time he’s got back to the hotel and showered, his fuse has re-shortened and he’s back to being furious again. He eats dinner as if someone preparing delicious food for him is some kind of personal insult and fumes all the way back to his hotel, where he reminisces about adolescence by throwing himself onto his bed and sulking. He’s had a shitty day and it’s Danny’s fault for not being here to snap him out of it because Steve is not in a reasonable mood and the fact that he is entirely to blame for Danny not being here is not relevant to his life right now. What is relevant is that Danny would never allow him to spend a whole day being this much of a dick if he were here. If Danny were here he’d raise his eyebrows and get that affronted look and say things like “that time of the month, princess?”, because Danny’s not above being kind of a dick himself, and “look who got out the wrong side of the bed this morning”, and “what the hell is the matter with you?”. If Danny were here, Steve would have to wrangle himself into a better frame of mind just to shut him up, but Danny’s not here and Steve’s still seething about it when he furiously falls asleep.

Day 11

What the hell _is_ the matter with him?

Day 12

Okay, so it’s understandable that he’d be angry. He didn’t need to leave, there was no reason for it, and he wants to fix it but he doesn’t know if it’s the right time for that, because with everything Danny’s been through lately probably the last thing he needs is for Steve to land back in his lap in even more of a state than he was when he left. From the tone of Danny’s emails, he’s starting to feel better, he’s sounding more like his old self, he’s healing and Steve doesn’t want to set him back. Steve knows he can be a bit much. He has two settings: either he shares nothing, or he overshares to the point where he overwhelms people and God knows Danny’s been doing the heavy lifting in the second category for a long time now. What if Danny’s doing better because he’s getting a chance to actually focus on himself without Steve and his issues getting in the way and if Steve wants what’s best for Danny, he needs to stay away for a while? Leaving might have been a mistake, but now that he’s gone, would going back be an even bigger one? And Steve did leave Danny when Danny really needed him. It would be a bit selfish of him to turn up wanting Danny’s support now.

On the other hand, it’s not even been two weeks. Is this a better late than never situation? Is it just going to get worse the longer he leaves it? His issues can wait, it’s not like he’s going to be dealing with them yet anyway, he could just as easily not deal with them yet in Hawaii as he can in Italy.

Steve knows he can be a bit of a martyr sometimes but he honestly doesn’t know what to do and it goes round and round in his head as he walks around the ruins without really seeing them. It’s all starting to look the same, his head is fuzzy and he can’t take anything in, it’s like trying to think through soup. Now the anger’s drained away he feels weak and exposed, like he’s been peeled and hollowed out at the same time. He’d crawl back into denial if he could. It might not have been peaceful but at least it was safe.

On the way out of Pompeii he goes into the room with the plaster casts; he hasn’t been in here before because he thought it wasn’t anything he hadn’t already seen. Steve’s seen actual dead bodies, quite a few of which were not actually dead before he came along, but these aren’t anything like bodies. They’re like sculptures. Unfinished, like the lives of the people who used to take up the space they now occupy. 

The longer he looks, the more he begins to feel that he’s intruding. He gets a sudden flash of a tent in Afghanistan, a camera set up to record the end of his life, the impotent fury that his last desperate moments were about to be immortalised on film for others to gawk at, just as these people’s last desperate moments have been immortalised in plaster for others to gawk at just as he’s doing now, everything that made them who they were reduced to this, not a person, just the fading echo of a death beyond help or hope.

Surely this isn’t how they wanted to be remembered.

-x-

Steve at fifteen quickly learns how to put on a stoic front (as befits a McGarrett man) and cry in the shower until the hot water is gone (as befits the boy he actually is), and then even more quickly learns how to not cry at all.

Steve at forty-three is in a hotel so the water never runs cold. He gets into the shower in daylight; by the time he gets out it’s full dusk and he has to grope for his towel in the gloom.

Day 13

No more ruins. Pompeii has been an invaluable help and he never wants to set foot there again.

He spends the morning wandering around Sorrento and the afternoon immersing himself in the ocean. He swims for hours, losing himself in the rhythm of the strokes, the resistance of the water against his body as he tames it to his will. It’s bigger and more powerful than he is, but he claims it as a small victory nonetheless.

When he gets back to his room in need of a shower and remembers to put the bathroom light on first, he decides this counts as progress. As it turns out there’s plenty of light left in the day when he’s done, but still. Small victories.

Day 14

After two weeks in Italy, he’s starting to think it might be time to move on. He has no idea where to go but he doesn’t want to stay. He hasn’t found any kind of resolution here, just the excavation of old hurts that he doesn’t know what to do with and he’s never felt less at peace in his life.

Steve’s seen a lot of the world but not usually under the best of circumstances. He does some research over an early lunch, hoping something will recommend itself - maybe Asia, a trek at altitude to make thinking harder. White water rafting in Africa. Bungee jumping from a helicopter into an active volcano in South America, that one has his name written all over it, plus Danny would go nuclear when Steve showed him the video, which is almost enough to sell it on its own - but nothing does. There are so many places he could go, and nowhere he wants to be.

After lunch he buys a bubblegum flavor gelato, mostly so he can take a picture for Charlie. It turns his tongue a bright, electric blue; he sticks it out to examine it in the side mirror of a handy parked car and suddenly in that moment he misses Hawaii more than he can bear. He doesn’t want to be where he’s ended up. He wants to be back at the beginning, when everything was new and Danny being pissed at him was funny and he was blissfully unaware of just how much of his life was built on lies. God, they were so young and they didn’t know anything, they had no idea what life was going to do to them, that they were going to end up on opposite sides of the world because of something that happened when they were children, because of a rule that’s still trying to tell Steve that he has to be noble and self-sacrificing, that he has to deal with things by himself.

That he’s not allowed to be homesick. 

And Danny-in-his-head is right, it is a bullshit rule. Who is he kidding, Danny would never have let Steve send him away, just like he tried to talk Steve out of sending himself away, because this lone wolf act is bullshit but Steve doesn’t really get it, because of the rule. He could never see that the rule was bullshit, because of the rule. What kind of fucked up vicious circular logic is that?

 _Immunity and means, fucker_ , he thinks, fumbling with his phone, searching for flights. He’s going to have to get to Rome and even then it’s going to take over a day to get back to Hawaii. A whole day. How did he manage to get so far away from where he was supposed to be?

But that’s a question for the ages - namely the ages he’s about to spend folded into a variety of uncomfortable airline seats - because he’s got five hours to get back to his hotel, book his ticket, pack, check out and get to Rome. He’s going to catch so much shit for barely making it to the two-week mark after all the hoopla he made about leaving, and Danny will be doing the I-was-right dance until the end of time, but he can’t bring himself to care. He’ll call Danny from the airport - no, scratch that, he’ll call Danny when he gets to Tokyo because it’ll be early morning in Hawaii when he leaves Rome and Danny will bitch about being woken up and then spend the whole day worrying that Steve’s going to change his mind somewhere between Rome and Honolulu. He’ll call from Tokyo airport, from the boarding gate, and he’ll ask Danny to meet him on their beach. He knows Danny will want to pick him up at the airport but that’s okay. Later there’ll be all the time in the world for what Danny wants but for now Steve only has it in him to think about what _he_ wants, and Steve?

Steve’s forty-three years old. He just wants to go home.


End file.
